Adventures in KU - Round Two

Hello folks. This write up is a little delayed (well a lot delayed) and I’m sorry about that. I realized that I was much better about this when I was doing the breakdowns each month. That being said, this will be a summary post of how I did in my second round of KU.

Month 1 (May 19- June 18)

Sales

“Sale” wise 831, but you’ll notice that’s in quotes reason being most of those were FREE downloads. I ran a free promotion on The Lists from May 22-May 26 the majority of those numbers reflect what was given away. Because I didn’t want to sink a lot of money into promoting giving away my book, I did low cost options. Ran a promo on Love Kissed Book Bargains ($15) BUT if you’re part of their Facebook group, they have coupon codes so I only paid $5. The day it ran netted me the biggest download day (596). My other promotions were simply on my social media. I had a second smaller reach one ($10) and the day it ran I only had 20 downloads, the lowest day across the board.

Now, I realize that The Lists probably wasn’t going to generate a lot of ‘read through’ as people would have to go backwards, but still I hoped. My total paid sales for the month totaled 7.

Fiendish: 5

Not Broken: 2

The Lists: “824”

Page reads

1804 for the time period.

Not Broken: 1418

The Lists: 386

Royalties (US payouts only): April pay out $41.79 with $7.62 coming from page reads. That was for 15 sales (1 paperback) and 1632 page reads.

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Month 2 (June 19- July 18)

Sales

I had 15 sales during this month.

Fiendish: 6

Not Broken: 8

The Lists: 1

On the surface those look like great numbers for me. I did run a Kindle countdown for Not Broken @ $1.99 from June 21-June 28 which is where 6 of 8 of the sales came from. Again with keeping with the low cost promotion, I did social media boosting and paid $5 to run another Love Kissed Books ad in their newsletter.

Page reads

Those went down from the previous time period with me getting only 1550.

Not Broken: 1304

The Lists: 246

Royalties (US payouts only) : May payout $25.00 with $6.10 being from page reads. 9 sales and 1362 page reads.

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Final month (July 19- August 18)

Sales

I sold 12 books total for the final month. It honestly still surprises me that Fiendish, the non-KU book in this grouping continues to be my ‘big’ seller even though I don’t do any promoting for it. I do wonder what would happen if I actually did, but that’s a thought process for another post. This being the final month, I didn’t sink any funds into promoting the books. I did sporadic social media posting, but that was it.

Fiendish: 9 (including 1 paperback)

Not Broken: 2

The Lists: 1

Page reads

Those went up from the previous month, BUT they were all for Not Broken. 1785 total. I don’t know if that was carry over from the promotion I ran during the Kindle Countdown, or what, but it is what it is.

What I decided from this however was to pull The Lists from KU as it consistently under performed. I boosted it as much as Not Broken, but it never really got any traction. Not even read through from those that read Not Broken, despite it being linked in the back of the book.

Royalties (US payouts only) : June payout $28.75 with $8.96 coming from page reads. 17 sales and 1936 page reads.

Not Broken remains as of now for a third round, but I’m uncertain on if I will keep it for a fourth. I’ve gone weeks with no pages reads and only recently had a spike because I’m trying a freebie promotion through Story Origin. If not for that, I’m fairly certain my reads would have still been at zero which they had been since about August 18^th through September 4^th when the promo kicked in.

This current round of KU will lead me into mid-October so I’ll do another write up at that point with my determination on if I stay or go. I have an upcoming release, another novella and I’m on the fence if I want to attempt KU with a ‘fresh’ book or just take it wide and figure out more ways to increase sales on the other platforms.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Until next time

~Meka